John H. McWhorter, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes
and comments extensively on race, ethnicity and cultural issues for the
Institute's Center for Race and Ethnicity. He also writes a regular
column in the New York Sun. McWhorter's new book, Winning the
Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America (Gotham Books) was released
in early 2006 and has already generated widespread acclaim. He was
nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in
Non-Fiction and has appeared numerous national TV and radio shows, such
as Meet the Press, John McLaughlin's One on One, the
O'Reilly Factor and NPR's Fresh Air. McWhorter is also a
well-known and widely published linguistics scholar.

John McWhorter is also the author of the New York
Times Best seller Losing the Race (Harper Perennial), and an
anthology of race writings, Authentically Black (Gotham Books).
McWhorter's work on race and cultural issues has appeared in leading
publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The
Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The National
Review, City Journal, and The Chronicle of Higher
Education. McWhorter also does regular commentaries for All
Things Considered.

In addition to his work for the Center for Race and
Ethnicity, McWhorter is a noted linguist and the author of The Power
of Babel: A Natural History of Language, on how the world's
languages arise, change, and mix, and Doing Our Own Thing: The
Degradation of Language and Music in America and Why We Should,
Like, Care. He has also written a book on dialects and Black
English, The Word on the Street, and three books on Creole
languages. The Teaching Company released his 36-lecture audiovisual
course The Story of Human Language in 2004. His latest academic
book on linguistics is Defining Creole. The next, Language
Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language
Grammars, will be published in 2007.

John McWhorter earned his PhD in linguistics from
Stanford University in 1993 and became Associate Professor of
Linguistics at UC Berkeley after teaching at Cornell University

All about the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't
Save Black America
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'This is a remarkable book because, in its way, it
celebrates hip-hop even as it argues against its political
significance. McWhorter separates the powerful elements of the
music itself from the often mindless political pretensions that
surround it. He does what only the best cultural critics can do:
he parses and clarifies to show the way beyond the dead-ends
that art forms inevitably come to. He wants hip-hop to align
with logic and reason. He wants it to grow.'
'Shelby
Steele, author of The Content of Our Character
'John McWhorter is one of the few of whom it can be said, 'He
thinks for himself and goes his own way.' In All About the Beat
he takes on all of the exaggerated claims for hip-hop as
something more than a long-running and lucrative trend. With
absolute clarity, he proves them not to be the claims of
airheads but airholes'empty openings in the wall of American
popular culture. This book is a short but sharp and substantial
rebuttal of the academic hustlers, lightweight rabble-rousers,
and camp followers who do not know the difference between smoke
and fire. For the good of us all, John McWhorter does.'
'Stanley Crouch, author of Considering Genius and The
Artificial White Man

Winning
the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black
America
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Amazon

In his first major book on the state
of black America since the New York Times bestseller Losing the
Race, John McWhorter argues that a renewed commitment to
achievement and integration is the only cure for the crisis in
the African-American community.

Winning the Race examines the roots of the serious problems
facing black Americans today'poverty, drugs, and high
incarceration rates'and contends that none of the commonly
accepted reasons can explain the decline of black communities
since the end of segregation in the 1960s. Instead, McWhorter
posits that a sense of victimhood and alienation that came to
the fore during the civil rights era has persisted to the
present day in black culture, even though most blacks today have
never experienced the racism of the segregation era.

McWhorter traces the effects of this disempowering conception of
black identity, from the validation of living permanently on
welfare to gansta rap's glorification of irresponsibility and
violence as a means of "protest." He discusses particularly
specious claims of racism, attacks the destructive posturing of
black leaders and the "hip-hop academics," and laments that a
successful black person must be faced with charges of "acting
white." While acknowledging that racism still exists in America
today, McWhorter argues that both blacks and whites must move
past blaming racism for every challenge blacks face, and
outlines the steps necessary for improving the future of black
America.

A conventional wisdom among creolists is that creole is a
sociohistorical term only: that creole languages share a
particular history entailing adults rapidly acquiring a language
usually under conditions of subordination, but that structurally
they are indistinguishable from other languages. The articles by
John H. McWhorter collected in this volume demonstrate that this
is in fact untrue. Creole languages, while complex and nuanced
as all human languages are, are delineable from older languages
as the result of their having come into existence only a few
centuries ago. Then adults learn a language under untutored
conditions, they abbreviate its structure, focusing upon
features vital to communication and shaving away most of the
features useless to communication that bedevil those acquiring
the language non-natively. When they utilize their rendition of
the language consistently enough to create a brand-new one, this
new creation naturally evinces evidence of its youth:
specifically, a much lower degree of the random accretions
typical in older languages, which only develop over vast periods
of time. The articles constitute a case for this thesis based on
both broad, cross-creole ranges of data and focused expositions
referring to single creole languages. The book presents a
general case for a theory of language contact and creolization
in which not only transfer from source languages but also
structural reduction plays a central role, based on facts whose
marginality of address in creole studies has arisen from issues
sociopolitical as well as scientific. For several decades the
very definition of the term creole has been elusive even among
creole specialists. This book attempts to forge a path beyond
the inter- and intra-disciplinary misunderstandings and
stalemates that have resulted from this, and to demonstrate the
place that creoles might occupy in other linguistic subfields,
including typology, language contact, and syntactic theory.

Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music
and Why We Should, Like, Care
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Acclaimed linguist McWhorter (The Power of Babel
[2002]) explores the social dynamics that have changed the
English language since the 1960s and threaten to erode our
intellectual prowess. Comparing past speakers from Abraham
Lincoln to Mario Cuomo to more modern speakers, including
President George W. Bush, McWhorter laments the loss of the art
of oration, notwithstanding Jesse Jackson and the black
preaching tradition. He traces the current emphasis on oral
versus written speech across a variety of cultures and times.
McWhorter focuses on the forces at work in the U.S. that have
heightened the appeal of plain-speaking since the 1960s,
including the influence of music, the breakdown of racial
barriers, and the rise in immigration and technology. While he
sees the trend toward emphasizing the oral over the written as
"the celebration of the art in spoken language," he laments the
impact on our ability to read, write, and critique. McWhorter's
eloquent style and cogent analysis will appeal to readers
concerned about trends in American education and communication.
'Vanessa BushCopyright ' American Library Association.
All rights reserved

McWhorter, a linguistics professor, ventures again into his
sideline as a black public intellectual as he did in his earlier
work, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America
(2000), this time examining the direction--or misdirection--of
black leadership in America. His working assumption is that
black leaders--wedded to the political left, the Democratic
Party, and affirmative action--are out of step with the times.
He argues that the civil rights era is dead, and appropriately
so. The new battleground against racism requires individual
rather than collective action. McWhorter criticizes the icons
and issues of black leadership from Randall Robinson on
reparations, to Jesse Jackson's shakedown of lucrative deals for
his friends, to Al Sharpton for perpetuating notions of
victimhood. McWhorter's criticism of this old vanguard of the
civil rights movement is formulaic in the mode of the Republican
right wing. However, his real contribution to the debate
regarding new directions for racial progressiveness is his
emphasis on the positives of black endurance and progress.
Despite its partisan slant, this is a worthy book.
'Vernon Ford Copyright ' American Library Association. All
rights reserved

The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language
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This book is not for those uncomfortable with change.
McWhorter's main goal is to convey to laypeople what linguists
know about the inexorable changeability of languages. He
compares our popular understanding of language to Monopoly
instructions--static and written as though "from on high." But
whereas Parkers Brothers is not likely to revise the rules of
its game, language is as transitory as a cloud formation. From
this analogy, aided by parallels with natural evolution,
McWhorter shows us how the world's many dialects arose from a
single Ur-tongue. He emphasizes the idea that "dialect is all
there is." What we call a "sandard language" is in fact a
dialect that has been anointed by people in power and by
cultural circumstances. All this becomes a tad academic in
places, but McWhorter's use of analogies, anecdotes, and popular
culture keeps the discussion lively. A worthy contribution to
our understanding of the defining feature of human life.
'Philip HerbstCopyright ' American Library Association. All rights reserved

Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard
English
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A barbed rebuttal to the conservative view that popular
culture is destroying the English language. Though there is a
contingent of linguists who fight the fact, our language is
always changing--not only through slang, but sound, syntax, and
words' meanings as well. Debunking the myth of "pure" standard
English, tackling controversial positions, and eschewing
politically correct arguments, linguist John McWhorter considers
speech patterns and regional accents to demonstrate just how the
changes do occur. Wielding reason and humor, McWhorter
ultimately explains why we must embrace these changes,
ultimately revealing our American English in all its variety,
expressiveness, and power.

Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America
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For the past two decades, an academic cottage industry has
developed to analyze--and some would say overemphasize--the
social and educational problems of African Americans. Such
writers as Dinesh D'Souza, Shelby Steele, Armstrong Williams,
and Ken Hamblin have all contributed in this area; now add to
that list John McWhorter, a Berkeley linguistics professor and
the author of Word on the Street, an examination of Ebonics and
Black English. The baic idea he presents in this occasionally
insightful if flawed book is that African Americans are not
advancing socially as a result of victimology, separatism, and
anti-intellectualism.

According to the author, victimology "has become a keystone of
cultural blackness to treat victimhood not as a problem to be
solved but as an identity to be nurtured," while "separatism
encourages black Americans to conceive of black people as an
unofficial sovereign entity, within which the rules other
Americans are expected to follow are suspended out of a belief
that our victimhood renders us morally exempt from them."
Anti-intellectualism is a belief that "school is a 'white'
endeavor." McWhorter suggests that only blacks embrace such
opinions, placing most of the blame on them while
underemphasizing the institutional racism that facilitates such
views. Needless to say, McWhorter has no love for the likes of
Al Sharpton, Hazel Carby, June Jordan, or Patricia Williams and
their ilk. His chapter on Ebonics, his specialty, is the most
nuanced, though certainly not the final word on the matter. And
though some readers will be turned off by his use of tired
anti-affirmative-action, right-wing clich's, anyone interested
in the education of African Americans in the post civil rights
era will find Losing the Race a worthy read. 'Eugene Holley Jr.